Design Philosophy: Precedent

Today, I am going to go into some of the design philosophy underlying the hobby practice of homebrewing. I am going to discuss the foundation principal of creating functional homebrew: Precedent. Keep in mind that this is not about making balanced or fair content, just content that functions in the game you are designing for. Balance is a whole other can of worms.

I'm talking about this because homebrew is my favorite thing about this hobby. D&D was born as a set of homebrew content and house rules for a wargame called Chainmail. 3.5e killed that blood of creativity with its heavy mechanical and gamist bent, and that dirth of freedom is a plague to our hobby. Today, we have the Dungeon Masters Guild. Wizards of the Coast blatantly supports homebrew to such an extent that you can make money off of your homebrew content. I support this movement fully, and love what Wizards of the Coast has done with D&D over the last 4 years. And I want others to join in. To hopefully guide some people toward making better homebrew content, let's get down to talking shop.

Generally, people assume that the objective of a work of homebrew is to be compatible with the official core-book-rules content of its given edition of the game. To that end, anything that is being made for the game must be considered in comparison to that core rules content, and nothing else. Obviously, if we were to compare new homebrew to other previously existing homebrew, you can easily begin to slowly drift away from the original mechanical balance of the core rules. This is how you get power creep: when designers stop working within the context of their original system. By requiring content to be considered in the context of only the core rules material, we are ensuring that we do not generate power creep in our homebrew.

5e Corebooks. That means Eladrin might be valid.

This has manifested itself in the D&D 5e community in the "core+1" rule. (The core+1 rule states that a player may design their character using the core rules and a maximum of 1 other supplement book.) Core+1 is a table rule used by one of the developers of 5e to prevent cherry picking and dumpster diving. (An unsportsmanlike activity in D&D where a player uses the best options from many disparate book sources to make an overpowered character that takes advantage of synergies the developers could never have accounted for.) This rule's adoption by the developers and community as a whole shows something of how they design new content: they design new stuff to work with the core only. Core+1 prevents cross-supplement synergy from happening within a single character.

Some of the many supplements.

Precedent is the system of unwritten standards that core rules content represents. For example, in 5th edition, no simple weapon deals 2d12 damage, so a simple weapon for 5th edition that does deal 2d12 damage would be running contrary to that precedent. Now, that does not mean you are restrained to just replicating the core material, it simply means that the mechanical aspects of your homebrew should be in-tune with it. For example, there are no races that can fly in the core books for 3.5 edition. That does not mean you cannot make a flying race for that edition! However, you will need to find a way to mechanically offset the combat advantage flight offers to ranged PCs, such that it will be mechanically equivalent to the other races of that game.

Also included in precedent are the design standards and guidelines provided by the developers. These standards and guidelines may have been published in a wide variety of forms, including core books, magazines, pamphlets, press releases, interviews, podcasts, web pages, and even twitter posts. This piecemeal release of design standards is done primarily because the developers work for a company, and they need to protect both their copyrights, and their development methods, in order to maintain competitiveness in the market. As a result, it is pretty much impossible to keep track of official design standards, due to their incredibly informal method of release.

Just understand that, as an absolute baseline of quality, people expect your work to be compatible with the game it was made for. It uses the same rules, and works on the same math. I don't think that's too much to ask: that your work make some sense. Having some reasonable restraint is valuable in making homebrew that others will find acceptable.